These days there are dozens of ways that employees can stay connected with one another through apps and services like email and instant messaging. While all of these productivity tools are meant to help, they often end up convoluting our workday and making us less productive than ever. Veamly, a new tool that helps consolidate workplace applications and online tools is the answer to the problem of streamlining. And we sat down with Veamly’s Emna Ghariani to discuss how workplaces can further help their employees through technology.
Grit Daily: You had your own ventures before Veamly. Share those.
Emna Ghariani: Prior to Veamly, I founded Poindevster, a service company with the value proposition of CPO as a service. At Poindevster, I provided mobile, web services and business consulting for non-tech founders. I worked with founders from Los Angeles to Indonesia helping them build their products and their business strategy.
This experience opened my eyes to the cost of distractions at work and the daily challenges engineering teams face whether when it comes to communication or heavy collaboration.
When I wasn’t running the company, I served as a Global director MENA region for the founder institute where I coached several founders over 5 successful cohorts (and counting) at Founder Institute Tunisia. This has been one of my biggest dreams as I have always wanted to bridge the gap between Silicon Valley and Tunisia.
Prior to that, as an impact driven person, I started Foundup, a Social Enterprise that aims to help unemployment through entrepreneurship, technical and soft-skills training.
GD: For the uninitiated, what does Veamly do?
EG: Veamly is a desktop app for software engineers that connects all their non coding apps like Slack, Jira, and Github together in a centralized distraction free yet coherent workflow or “command center.” While they access all their favorite apps from one platform, we give them on top of them a prioritized single pane of glass across all their communication and boost productivity by at least 30%.
Data/process freaks will definitely love Veamly as much as the ones who appreciate a little process in their daily work.
GD: Why bother to “centralize” apps? Isn’t centralization “part of the problem?”
EG: We centralize apps in terms of access and not data. By providing a single source of truth, we reduce the friction of context switching, distractions and lack of focus at work. Although all your work apps are wrapped under Veamly, you can still access them individually. Veamly just aggregates data to give engineering teams better visibility on what’s going on and what needs to be done.
Centralizing access here is indeed the byproduct of the explosion in collaboration apps that we have witnessed over the last decade.
The main problem with centralization, as we once knew it however, is mainly related to data and the speed of search. This is where Veamly shines indeed by offering instant unified search across your apps.
GD: Why is search so important?
EG: “According to Interact Source, 19.8 % of business time – the equivalent of one day per working week – is wasted by employees searching for information to do their job effectively. IDC data shows that “the knowledge worker spends about 2.5 hours per day, or roughly 30% of the workday, searching for information.”
Time is the only currency that we can’t recreate. Optimizing information search doesn’t only save you time and energy but also helps workers focus on the actual tasks and getting them done.
We live in an era where burnout culture is the norm despite the blessing of technology. Isn’t that astonishing? Warren Buffett once said: “If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is — your life is a disaster. That’s the ultimate test of how you have lived your life.”
But how are you gonna be loved if you are always at work even when you are at home with your loved ones at the end of the day?
GD: What’s all the rage behind Natural Language Processing?
EG: Natural Language Processing can be a bit tricky because the big question is: how can we teach machines to understand and “speak” human languages? There is a lot of debate here for sure. But there are organizations like OpenAI with a goal to ensure AI in general never fulfills the premise of taking over the world.
I believe that NLP is a technique to enhance our way of interacting with technology and to maximize our output.
GD: How does “NLP” relate back to Veamly?
EG: We pride ourselves in providing a product that helps software engineers focus at work and do the actual tasks. Our proprietary NLP engine detects the important streams of conversations across your different apps; whether you need to act on this Jira ticket, pay attention to your manager’s slack message or inform your teammate to merge that PR you have been waiting for. By intentionally redirecting your attention to the things that push you one step further towards the goal of getting actual work done, Veamly is freeing you from decision fatigue and advocating for your team well being overall.
